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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23027170">Everyone Wants To Help</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/psycho_phreak/pseuds/psycho_phreak'>psycho_phreak</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Saints Row</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Stilwater, brief mention of torture, just what happened to carlos you know how it is, uhhhh spoilers i guess for the second game</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 12:55:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,052</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23027170</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/psycho_phreak/pseuds/psycho_phreak</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The lines between Saints and Stilwater blurs for the Boss as they reclaim the city</p>
<p>Set between SR 2 and 3</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Everyone Wants To Help</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It started small.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>People started talking to you on the street, as if they knew who you were, what you did. They joked, they consoled, they demanded. You found yourself talking to strangers like old friends outside bars, found yourself smoking in groups of local women. Everyone asking about Gat, thanking you for killing the other gang leaders, crying about Carlos.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Everybody wants to help. They saw the cops, the kill board in the station, the random killings and rampant violence. They saw the Saints, gunning down gangs demanding protection money. They saw you, bloody and bruised and half dead, climbing a mountain of corpses to reclaim the city.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>And half of them knew you. Some from before, when the Saints were first around and you were murdering your way across the city. Some from even before that, the kids you went to high school with, the kids you used to hang around with in the trailer park. They know you and they tell your stories and now everyone knows who you are.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>You got the Saints up to steady presence everywhere in the city. You couldn’t walk across the street without seeing the flash of purple, the small salutes. This was your city now. Your reach was endless. You kept new recruits to the neighbourhoods they lived in, a way to keep things personal you figured. Extra motivation to protect what’s yours, what’s theirs.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Then it got weird.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>People sought you out to complain. Not Saints, but regular people. You go to a bar and an old man comes over to tell you about a non-Saint drug dealer selling tainted Loa Dust outside. You send the nearest Saint over to deal with it, thank the man. You turn back to your drink and a stripper comes over to tell you about a customer harassing her. You deal with this yourself, throw him out with more bones broken than not. Soon you learn the only way to drink in peace is to make sure Johnny is there, and that he’s fully and obviously armed.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Wherever you go people want to tell you their problems, expect you to deal with it. And you do, is the damnedest thing. You’re bored, the city is yours, you’ll take any excuse to do violence. Your gang has become a weird peace keeping force, doing far better at maintaining order than the cops ever did. Drug dealers are either sanctioned by you or dead, whores flock to the Saints to escape their shitty pimps, the stores give you money to protect them from cops.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>You could have ended it there. This was always your dream – the city so under your control that nothing happened without your say so, a city so covered in purple that it washed out every other colour, a city where you were mayor in all but title.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>But you didn’t. You didn’t get bored, you barely got greedy, you just started listening. On your morning runs, old men stop you to tell you about the problems in the healthcare system. Single mothers cry to you about making car payments. Kids in the mall told you why they were dropping out of school.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>You’re the face of the Friendly Neighbourhood Saints. Your new recruits want to keep their own areas safe, see themselves as sacrificing the chance of a normal life for the good of the people around them. You ask a kid why she joined the Saints and she tells you she wanted to keep her mom safe. Older members remember what happened to Carlos and you can see they’re glad it’s not them, glad that eye for an eye shit is behind them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Carlos haunts you, haunts your dreams and haunts your waking moments with your lieutenants, your friends. You can never let that happen again. It was your job to keep him safe and you failed. Letting one friend die a horrific and tortuous death nearly killed you. You make it your mission to get the others out of the game.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>You were sick and tired of all the ways your city was broken, all the ways Ultor and the corporate shitheels conspired to stop people like you from ever gaining any ground in the world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>You march back into the Phillipe Loren building days after you kill Dane Vogel. With your lieutenants in tow, you take control. You give Shaundi a TV show, and it somehow miraculously gets her clean and keeps her clean. You give Pierce a recording studio and when that bombs you give him PR and a new lease on life. You keep them <em>safe</em>. You keep them away from all the gang shit, the shit they could barely handle to begin with.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>You give Johnny the Saints. You’re still the Boss of course, you will be until you die for real. But Johnny needs the Saints more than you do right now. You need a project in front of you, and right now your project is the nitty gritty work of fixing your shitty city. You’re investing in the hospitals, in the schools, in rebuilding Shivington - but this time with the proper fire safety regulations in place. Johnny is still hurting, and while you cope by throwing yourself into task after task, Johnny just takes it out on people and cops in sprays of bullets.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>You’re still out at the weekends doing violence, doing crimes, hanging out with Johnny. But it’s not the same. You steal a car and hold the passenger hostage and she talks your ear off about how much she admired the way you killed Maero, until you stop the car and make her get out. You rob a store and the kid behind the counter asks if this comes out of this months protection money. Old ladies swat at you as you run past and shout that they’ll tell Gat.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Everyone knows you. Everyone wants to help. Everyone wants their own piece of the Saints.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>You’re not sure at what point you don’t own the city anymore but you don’t mind. It owns you like the Saints own you. At some point the lines between Saint and civilian blurred for you and now it’s all the same and you take ownership of all of it. This whole damn city is your crew.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I just found this in my drafts and I'm posting it unedited from maybe years ago let me know if there are mistakes because I have not looked for any<br/>Thank you for reading!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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